LAWRENCE S. COHEN, M.D., Class of 1958

NYU was great preparation for the life ahead. The common threads our class had were a love of learning and a desire to help. Those qualities I feel served us well in later years.

Upon graduation I began a medical internship at Yale under the leadership of Dr. Paul Beeson. We had 12 interns in our group. My internship at Yale was one of my happiest years. I had no responsibilities outside of medicine. I was single and I lived in the hospital. It was very rigorous. We worked all day long and either Monday and Wednesday nights and all of the weekend or alternatively Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights. It was essentially an every other day, every other weekend on call schedule.

In 1960 during the Vietnam War a physician in training had to join one of the uniformed or non-uniformed military services. In 1960 I joined the Public Health Service in the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the Epidemiology Intelligence Service. I was stationed, after spending a month in Atlanta, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a fellow in the Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. My job at Hopkins was to be the hospital epidemiologist, specifically looking at nosocomial infections. During my first year at Johns Hopkins I met my future wife Jane Abramson. Her family is from Baltimore. We were married eight months later in August 1961.

During my residency years I started gravitating toward cardiology as a subspecialty. In retrospect, the early death of my father from heart disease played a major role in my choosing the subspecialty of Cardiology. I have never regretted that decision. In 1962 we moved to Boston where I began my cardiology fellowship with Dr. Richard Gorlin, at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. There I learned how to do cardiac catheterization. I enjoyed the physiology of the cardiac catheterization laboratory. That was also the dawn of coronary arteriography. Those two years of fellowship were very special and led to my returning to Yale in July 1964 as a senior resident in medicine. Having been trained in cardiac catheterization I was often asked to lead the team in diagnostic catheterization procedures even though I was still a resident.

The course that led me into academic medicine was influenced by one of our classmates, Jack Braunwald. While I was in Boston learning Cardiology he was in Boston learning Hematology. Jane and I sort of adopted him. In about January 1965 while in my second year of residency I received a call from Gene Braunwald at the NIH. Gene said “My brother Jack thinks a lot of you and he says you have had some good training in cardiology. Would you consider coming down and working at the National Heart Institute in my branch?” (Gene was a stellar graduate of NYU a decade earlier) My time at the NIH solidified my decision to remain in academic cardiology.

Our daughters Melanie and Wendy were born in 1963 and 1965. They had their early childhood in Bethesda, Maryland. While at the NIH our classmate Paul Bornstein and his family spent many enjoyable days together with us and our family. In 1968 however my family and I picked up and moved to Dallas, Texas where I was recruited to be Chief of Clinical Cardiology at the University of Texas (Southwestern) School of Medicine and Parkland Hospital. We enjoyed living in Dallas and expected to live there for a number of years but in 1970 I was recruited to come back to Yale as a tenured Professor of Medicine and Chief of Cardiology. The challenge was too much to turn down. I have been at Yale ever since. In 1981 I was named to an endowed Chair, The Ebenezer K. Hunt Professorship in Medicine and Cardiology. In 1990 I was asked to split my time between Cardiology and the Dean’s office. I became Deputy Dean at Yale and in 1996 I became Special Advisor to the Dean. One of my unique responsibilities was being the Research Integrity Officer, vested with the responsibility of looking into any allegation of possible scientific misconduct.

Our two daughters are married and each has two children. I became emeritus a year ago but remain full time at the medical school with an active practice of cardiology. Jane is a psychiatric social worker and sees patients regularly throughout the week.

During my years at Yale I have published over 150 articles and 4 books. I have been Program Chairman for the American Heart Association Annual Meeting, Governor for the State of Connecticut for the American College of Cardiology, President of the Association of University Cardiologists and President of the Interurban Clinical Club. I have been at Yale Medical School among the longest of any active faculty member and in many ways I serve as the institutional memory. Since joining the faculty I have served under 9 Deans giving me a more personal understanding of the works of Machiavelli

Good health remains the arbiter of how we spend our twilight years. I have been fortunate in having good health, a wonderful wife, loving children and a career of which I am proud. I look forward to seeing our classmates on April 12, 2008.